Friday, 16 December 2011

Natural cures for Asthma?

About two years ago, I was diagnosed with asthma. After some changes to my lifestyle, the last whole body plethysmography measurement showed that my lungs are fine again although I do not use any medication anymore. The asthma is gone!

I would like to share these changes with you, hoping they may also benefit you and also to hear back what benefited others and what not. My personal experiment is a little small (n=1), thus it may well be that some improvement were just by accident and not because of lifestyle change. I have to say that I only had very light asthma. I never had an asthmatic attack, but regularly did wheeze lightly when exhaling at night, my voice was not so strong anymore and my lungs produced too much mucus (leading to some coughing and a coated tongue). Another sign was that the reliever medication (Bronchodilators) made jogging a lot easier.

Asthma is on the rise the last 50 years in the West. Already this points to lifestyle factors being important. Not much seems to be known about which factors these are. It has been noted that children growing up at farms as less affected by asthma as urban children. Based on this, it has been theorized that childhood contact with microbes is beneficial, but I guess there are quite a few other differences between the life on the country side and in cities.

The main changes I made are that I started with intermittent fasting, and nowadays sleep on a firm surface, and do much more walking/hiking. Also important may have been that I do not any grains any more, do less jogging and more sprinting and that I regularly tanning for more vitamin D.

Monday, 5 December 2011

Plan B for our planet

The Kyoto protocol is running out and the climate conference in Durban will likely end without a new stronger protocol to reduce (the growth) green house gas emissions. Maybe we need a plan B.

Under the Kyoto protocol a cap on the greenhouse gas emissions for the participating industrialized countries is set. Within this group emission rights can be traded, so that emissions are cut in the most efficient way. With a similar aim, emission can also be reduced by financing emission reductions in emerging economies and developing countries.

The problem of the Kyoto protocol is that the cap on the greenhouse emissions only makes sense if everyone is participating, or at least will participate as soon as they are rich enough. It is possible to do so, the Montreal protocol to curb emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) to protect the ozone layer works well. In case of the Montreal protocol only the producers of fridges, air conditionings and spray cans were affected. Greenhouse gasses are emitted by the energy, agricultural and building sectors. These are very powerful agents with an interest in the status quo. With propaganda and by encouraging conflicts, they can makes sure that there are always some large greenhouse gas producers not participating.

Maybe a global cap is not needed. Maybe we can see the problem as a dynamical one. How can we develop cost efficient technologies to reduce green house gas emissions. These technologies will be developed if there is a clear price signal; emitting CO2, wasting energy should be costly. Furthermore, economies of scale will be important to reduce the price and the increase competition.

For this, all we need are higher prices for greenhouse gas emissions (for non-renewable energy, etc.) in a large part of the world, but not necessarily all of the world. This part of the world should be allowed to protect itself against imports produced with cheap energy. That is all that the world would need to agree upon.

I expect that Europe would be the region that would start working this way. Due to the import levies, the playing field would be levelled and Europe's industry would be able to compete in the here and now with industries from the outside. In the long run, the Europe's industry would be come more efficient and would be world leader in green technologies. Technologies that will be needed everywhere once the prices of energy, concrete and fertilizer will start to rise due to shortages.

This is a quite attractive position. No disadvantage now, due to the levy, and likely advantages later, due to a technological leading role. It might well be that many countries would like to cooperate, get into this green region to be able to export without levies and to be part of the future.

An agreement that climate import levies are allowed may be easier to achieve as a global cap on greenhouse emissions.

Further reading

More posts on economics.

Thursday, 1 December 2011

Where good ideas come from

Steven Johnson wrote a book on creativity and innovations "Where good ideas come from - The seven patterns of innovation". The book is very well written, very captivating. In fact, I was reading another book (written by a scientist), which I put on hold to be able to read Good Ideas.

Afterwards, I am somewhat disappointed by the book. It was captivating, the examples where interesting and many references worth diving into, but I did not learn much about innovation and creativity. I expect that many people who were already interested in the topic, will feel the same.

In the last chapter Johnson tries to do some science himself. He takes a long list of innovations and divides them up along two axis: individual versus team work (networked) and market versus non-market. Most of the innovations are in the category networked and non-market. He finds this interesting as markets are supposed to be so great and market incentives should lead people to make more inventions, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

If you look at the innovations themselves, you quickly notice that the market innovations include some services and are mainly product and their components: airplane, steel, induction motor, contact lenses, etc. The non-market innovations do include some consumer products, but are mainly scientific ideas, theories, discoveries and instruments: Braille, periodic table, RNS splicing, Chloroform, EKG, cosmic background radiation, etc.

Depending on how much consumer products and how many scientific ideas you put into the list, you can get any ratio of market to non-market innovations. Furthermore, wouldn't the Western societies give most money for basic research to universities, the list would also have been very different. Thus it is not possible to conclude from this list, whether market or non-market forces are best at innovating.

I like Johnsons conclusion, I think he is right from an understanding of what motivates people to innovate, but you cannot reach this conclusion from the analysis in the last chapter.

Want to read something good by Steven Johnson? Read his book Emergence or go to his blog, with many interesting ideas on innovation on the internet.

Monday, 14 November 2011

Freedom to learn






A highly recommended blog, Freedom to learn.

Further reading


Paleo and fruitarian lifestyles have a lot in common
Natural cures for asthma?
Sleep and diversity
Is obesity bias evolutionary?
Freedom to learn
The paleo culture

Friday, 4 November 2011

Darwinian or Smithian competition

The most interesting part starts with the statement:



Thursday, 18 August 2011

Productivity and context

Just listened to Econtalk with Bob Lucas, Nobel Laureate and professor of economics at the University of Chicago, on economic growth. Naturally they also touched on productivity. It was almost funny how they avoided one conclusion. It was on the tip of my tongue as the ending of many sentences.

They talked about a person raising chickens in Indonesia, producing about 50 eggs per chicken per year and having to pick them himself. They asked themselves the question why he did not use modern technology to produce 300 eggs a year. Lucas answer was the lower cost of labor in Indonesia and he stated that this cost is determined by people working in factories in the cities. Lucas: "Economic growth is always associated by a move out of agriculture and into the city environment."

Then the host Russ Roberts asked Bod Lucas why an unskilled immigrant makes so much more money as soon as he (illegally) crosses the US border. Or in other words why he suddenly becomes more productive, while his human capital did not change. Lucas said that it is about cooperation with other people, how productive you are, e.g. as a busboy, depends on the quality of the waiters and of the cooks. Furthermore, the richer people in America are willing to pay more for a dinner.

Roberts then notes that it is a beautiful and interesting problem, that he is probably not more intelligent than his dad, but his standard of living is much higher. Lucas avoids answering, but states: "The other thing is: How many people are competing with you at your level?" "Don't drop out of high school!"

The answers hint at the following: Context is very important in determining productivity and wages. In the two examples, the farmer and the immigrant, context determines their wage, not their skill, not their education, not their human capital. For the farmer it is important that other people get better wages in the city, for the immigrant is is important where he works.

Productivity thus cannot be determined by looking at a person, it is not defined at the level of a person. Scientifically put: it is a nonlinear computation, not a linear one. In the latter case you could isolate one element, one person. Strictly speaking productivity is only defined at the global level. It is still reasonably well defined for nations and probably for large companies. (Even the productivity of companies is determined strongly by their network of partners and institutional factors.) Thus it is also not possible to compute how much a worker should earn. It is up for negotiation. And you certainly cannot claim that someone deserves to earn a certain amount.

Of course, the employee does need to work and often needs skills. Lets not start a nature-versus-nurture-type debate. Productivity is determined (almost) 100% by context and 100% effort. Just as an organism is determined 100% by nature (genes) and 100% by nurture (environment; context) and you can only split these two factors for a given variability in the environment.

It is thus very well possible that top managers get better salaries because they have a better bargaining position, not because they are more productive as it often stated in the media. Doubling the salary of all workers would be a problem to a company. However, a company does not go bankrupt because their CEO gets a double salary; there is only one CEO and there are basically no market forces to reduce it until it becomes extremely excessive. That may be an important reason for the differences in salaries, rather than skills.

Further reading

More posts on economics.

Sunday, 12 June 2011

Sleep and diversity

In an interesting article on sleep in traditional societies on Science News (which is not the news section of Science), Bruce Bower states that people used to sleep in groups and that differences in sleeping time where an advantage as it provided better protection for the sleeping group.
... sleep typically unfolds in shared spaces that feature constant background noise emanating from other sleepers, various domestic animals, fires maintained for warmth and protection from predators, and other people's nearby nighttime activities.
In traditional settings, however, highly variable sleep schedules among individuals and age groups prove invaluable, since they allow for someone to be awake or easily roused at all times should danger arise, Worthman holds.
Thus a diversity of sleep schedules may be well adaptive, may have been selected for by evolution as it provides better protection. It would be great if modern society would allow people to follow these natural needs, instead of forcing a fixed schedule on early birds and night owls.

By the way, the circadian sleep-wake cycle itself is an example of variability in the activity level. Science still wonders why we sleep. It may well be related to this variability, which allows one to be more active during the day; while at night the reserves are filled again and repairs are performed. A remaining question would still be why you need to close your eyes for this, which is dangerous.

Sleeping without mattress

I found the article linked on the page The Ergonomics of Sleep: Why a Hard Surface can Provide Sweet Dreams. This page argues that sleeping on a mattress is a recent invention and may not be ideal for everyone. To me it makes sense to use traditional behavior as Null-hypothesis; modern ideas are often useful (for instance, hygiene and vaccinations), but should be tested. Thus one week ago, I removed my mattress to see it this works for me and slept on the wooden panel below, but I did add an exercise mat and a comforter (German: Bettdecke) as cushioning. It is definitely not comfortable, but I sleep well, wake up much more alert and it is easy to get out of bed.

What makes it uncomfortable is that your weight is mainly born by your bones. If you sleep on your back your weight is on your heels, pelvis, shoulder blades and skull, on your side it is on your ankle, pelvis and shoulder, on your front the tops of the feet, the knees, pelvis, ribs (man) and collar bones. May there be a reason why exactly these places have no padding, no fat nor muscle? The reduced pressure on the weak body parts could maybe be beneficial for the circulation. Lying in a dimple on a mattress could change your posture (round back) and consequently your breathing.

I am curious what other people experienced and know about this topic; please leave a comment.

Further reading


Paleo and fruitarian lifestyles have a lot in common
Natural cures for asthma?
Is obesity bias evolutionary?
Freedom to learn
The paleo culture

Saturday, 28 May 2011

Good ideas, motivation and economics







Further reading

More posts on economics.

More posts on creativity.

Is obesity bias evolutionary?




Sunday, 1 May 2011

Against review - Against anonymous peer review of scientific articles


The quality of reviews


Honorary authorship of scientific articles


The library network - from book archiving to knowledge facilitator



On the philosophy of language



Saturday, 30 April 2011

An idea to combat bloat in genetic programming



Bloat and evolution



Advection of the disturbance fields in stochastic parameterisations



Stochastic parameterisations



Online generation of temporal and spatial fractal red noise


On cloud structure


Clouds are fractal


